Civic Theatre of Greater Lafayette's blogging adventure. A place to discuss Civic, promote shows, discuss theatre, and to just enjoy ourselves.

Wednesday, October 22, 2008

My teaching adventure.

I had the distinct pleasure this morning to teach a class for WALLA (Wabash Area Lifetime Learning Association). This local group of "elderly" people are probably more active than I am. You can go to the website here to learn more about this group. I highly recommend getting involved with this group if you are of age.

The class I taught is part of the "That's Entertainment" course series, coordinated by Bob Modlin and Virginia Carter. Over a few weeks this fall participants in the series (about 74 individuals) are being visited by Dick Jaeger, Kathy Matter of Purdue Bands, Steven Schlenk of PMO, Bill Hooper of the Lafayette Citizens Band, Sound Sensation (a barbershop quartet) Kirk Hallman of the Indiana Fiddler's Gathering, Clayton Lein of the Lafayette Chamber Singers (my talented and lovely wife is a member of this wonderful group) and Bach Chorale and the Lafayette Symphony Orchestra to discuss their collaborative effort in the first Bach Chorale concert of the year. In other words, I was in very esteemed and good company. It did impress me to again see the depth of culture in our "small" town. But that is not the point of this story.

I have for the past several weeks worked in snippets of time and stolen moments to put together a relatively impressive Power Point presentation. Due to some computer and software issues I used Open Office instead of Microsoft PowerPoint. The program works almost the same, and as I was bringing my laptop, there should be no problem (can you see where this is going). I had an hour of slides ready to go, pictures from the history of Civic Theatre (including the early days of the Lafayette Little Theatre). Snapshots of the Monon Depot Theatre, from before our purchase through today. I even had video snippets of our production of High School Musical (we had paid a special license allowing us to video tape and have limited use of said video). I arrived plenty early so that we could make sure that everything was working, honestly my biggest concern was sound from the videos. Well as many have already figured out, there were problems. My computer would not connect with the projector, no idea why not. Then of course the Open Office file would not open with the Microsoft PowerPoint program on WALLA's laptop.

Luckily I had taken the time to print out a (very) spare outline of the presentation, so I was not flying blind. Also luckily outside of my family there is nothing I like to talk about more than Civic Theatre, so filling an hour was simple, politics is a close third, but I would never dream of boring you with that in this forum.

All that really matters is that I had a wonderful time this morning and was able to talk to 74 very interested people about the theatre that we all love. Thank you to Bob and Virginia for putting this together, and thank you to all the WALLA members for continuing such a wonderful program.